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SaaS company Qualtrics has announced the release of Qualtrics XM Platform, an experience management platform designed to address the growing experience gap between what organisations actually deliver and expectations from the market, customers and employees.

With the XM Platform, Qualtrics is aiming to create an experience management category that will help companies measure, prioritize, and optimize the experiences companies deliver across the four foundational aspects of business—customers, products, employees and brands.

According to Ryan Smith, CEO, Qualtrics, there are two types of data: operational data and experience data. He believes that organisations have been looking exclusively at data about the past—the operational data or ‘O data’ for too long.

“Where companies fail is in not leveraging experience data, or ‘X data.’ X data is the human-factor data, the beliefs, emotions, and sentiments that tell you why things are happening and that help predict what is going to happen next. And while there are plenty of technologies to help companies manage their operational data, until now there hasn’t been a technology that makes it easy to capture and understand the X data,” Smith explains.

According to the company, experience management helps organisations close the experience gap and achieve four key outcomes:

“Because most organisations are O-data rich, and X-data poor, this has led to a huge gap between most companies’ ability to know what’s happening and understanding why it’s happening and how to adapt programs in real time. We call this the ‘experience gap’ and Qualtrics XM, our experience management platform, is the key to helping companies close this gap,” Smith added.

Qualtrics believes that the combination of new technologies, rapid advancements in customer experience (CX) programs and a younger consumer population is creating an immediate need for a platform to measure and optimize experiences across an organisation. Millennials and Generation Z are fast becoming the largest population groups in the world. Both groups have higher expectations when it comes to brands, the products they buy and the experiences around them.

“The internet of things, wearables, self-driving cars, cashier-free stores, automated home assistants, WiFi connected ordering buttons and deliveries by drone are leading the frenzied pack of experience expectations,” said Smith.

But he explains that to deliver great products and to provide delightful customer experience requires employee excellence across the organisation. A company’s ability to win in today’s business environment depends on its ability to create amazing and consistent experiences across all aspects of the business.